In last week's post, we summarized some word counts over the years to
definitively show that Brian is awesome, which he is. What left a bad taste,
however, was the weak attempt at the end of that diary to summarize word usage
via a single Wordle. Yes, Wordle is
awesome, but no one Wordle can this blog describe, as someone famous once
said; probably not somebody associated with Wordle, though.

Thus we bring you a deeper analysis of the blog via the simple tool of Word
Frequency Analysis (WFA). By simply counting how many times a word is used,
great insight into this blog and its content can be achieved. Or, at least,
mild amusement can your way be brought. Minimally, sentences can in Yoda style
be written.

The results below come from (somewhat arbitrary) comparisons of the
frequencies of different words. The conclusions come from my brain. Thus, the
former can be trusted, and the latter should likely be dismissed. But
hopefully each analysis is clear: a table, with a list of (frequency, word)
pairs, where frequency is the number of times that particular
word appeared in mgoblog over its
entire lifetime, 2004 until present.

And now, for the results! Brace yourselves, this gets ugly.

First, we analyze how often particular sports are mentioned:

3252

football

1119

hockey

1118

basketball

300

baseball

111

soccer

1

soccer-sucks-no-it-doesn't

The word football is mentioned over 3000 times in this history of articles on
this blog, or three times as often as hockey or basketall. This is a football
blog. Proven, BOOM!

Now, an analysis of how often various places are mentioned:

617

ann

613

arbor

156

columbus

119

pahokee

64

lansing

It's just as you thought: even Pahokee rules over Little Brother's home.

Now we study the popularity of various coaches:

2394

rodriguez

1332

carr

262

bo

248

tressel

183

ferentz

129

paterno

124

berenson

123

schiano

93

schembechler

55

woody

Rodriguez not surprisingly is mentioned more times than anybody
else. More importantly, Schembechler beats Woody again. 7-5-1 you Ohio lover!
And we put Schiano in there, well, because, you know.

You might find yourself wondering about the dominant mgoblog receiver. If so,
we give you the receiver analysis:

1002

manningham

721

breaston

469

avant

193

braylon

48

tacopants

Tacopants: Thrown to more often than you might like, but not the main target
of mgoblog, with only 48 mentions. And Manningham for the win - who can forget
his PSU or MSU performances?

Who is mgoblog's favorite running back? Well, this was an easy one to guess:

2447

hart

1606

minor

691

mcguffie

11

biakabutuka

Mgoblog harts Hart, and associated T-shirt sales. And Biakabutuka may only
have been mentioned 11 times by Brian, but each time he was mentioned, he went
for 313 yards. There is a t-shirt idea, by the way: "Biakabutuka 313" and
nothing else on it. He should start the 313 Foundation too; are you reading
this Tshimonga?

Onto the quarterback competition:

1720

henne

1305

forcier

734

tate

301

denard

261

devin

218

brady

101

navarre

10

dilithium

1

tate/denard

Henne for the win (also no surprise). Prediction for the year: the Dilithium count
goes up quite a lot. And a note on the high count of Forcier: Remember, said
Yoda, there was another.

And now we study two particular schools of football philosophy: Lloydball and Tresselball.

19

lloydball

5

tresselball

1

lloyd/tresselball

Lloydball for the win. Unfortunately, the dominance of Lloydball on this blog
turned out not to predict their head-to-head record (we would have settled for
19-5-1, yes).

Speaking of football philosophy, we also study the dominance of the spread:

688

spread

31

spreads

13

spread-option

3

spreaders

3

spread-type

3

spread-offense

3

non-spread

2

spread-to-run

2

spread-n-shred

2

spread-mad

2

anti-spread

1

ur-spread

1

spreadmania

1

spreadfather

1

spread/zone-read

1

spread-zone

1

spread-run-throw

1

spread-option-happy

1

spread-o

1

spread-ish

1

spread-hating

1

spread-happy

1

spread-happiness

1

spread-friendly

1

spread-first

1

spread-dominated

1

spread-crazy

1

spread-combating

1

spread-and-shred

1

pseudo-spread

1

hyper-spread

The spread rules mgoblog. Note: I am pretty sure most of these were football related.

Now we move onto more important matters, like the study mascot names:

1312

wolverines

462

buckeyes

400

spartans

272

gophers

225

badgers

130

hawkeyes

104

wildcats

109

illini

77

nittany

77

hoosiers

29

boilermakers

There were three references to gopherholes (which we didn't count for
the gophers). Either way, the Boilermaker is the least desirable mascot, which
we knew already. Even less mention than a Hoosier!

Finally, if you'll indulge, we'll get into some slightly more off-topic terms.
Let's start with food. What about the food preferences of mgoblog? Sadly, not
much data here, making us wonder if Brian eats very much or is rather some
kind of blog-creating Cyborg sent from our future UofM overlords to get us
through these rough times (possible, no? hmm? HMMM?). But from what we could find:

34

bacon

9

sausage

10

hamburger

4

hotdog

33

pizza

1

pppppizzaaa

13

coke

4

pepsi

So Brian likely eats bacon for breakfast, hamburgers for lunch, pizza for
dinner, and prefers Coke over Pepsi. ENQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW, AND NOW
THEY DO.

Being a blog of international repute, mgoblog also mentions some people of
differing nationalities:

28

germans

26

french

18

russians

4

greeks

400

spartans

What is this, a blog of the ancient era? Oh yeah, right, those
Spartans. Let's not remember them.

Brian also uses his fair share of saltier language. For example:

1

breast

2

breasts

Well, he's got those counts right, at least. And then there's:

182

ass

48

badass

29

asshole

27

kickass

23

asses

1

ass-kickage

1

ass-raping

1

ass-shaking

1

ass-tasting

1

asshat-wearing

1

asshatted

1

asshole/prick

1

asswhooping

1

crazyass

1

scary-ass

1

shiny-ass

1

silly-ass

1

skinny-ass

1

slow-ass

1

smarmy-ass

1

smartass

1

stupid-ass

1

wack-ass

1

whiteass

1

freekbass

So you can definitely tell your mother, there is lots of ass on this blog. If
you're wondering where "ass-tasting" came up in Brian's writings, see Blogs with Balls
Recappening. That is one crazy recappening. Finally, the F word:

68

fuck

48

fucking

7

motherfucker

6

motherfucking

5

fucked

4

fuckin

3

fuckers

3

motherfuckers

2

muthafucka

1

fuckchrist

1

fuckeyes

1

fuckity

1

mothafuckin

1

mothafucka*

A reasonable number of fucking going on here too, but probably not by the
readers (ZING!). The last one, mothafucka*, is used in the following gem, in
which some guy on Tulsa named Germany is repeatedly called "the Germinator" by
the announcers. Brian
writes:

"I suppose it is possible that Germany is a plant biology major and spends his
time before the snap screaming "I gonna sprout all up in your ass,
mothafucka*" at the quarterback, but it seems unlikely."

Classic.

Sorry, one last set of bad words:

115

appalachian

108

horror

Just keep moving folks, keep moving. And let them never be mentioned again.
Speaking of which:

60

kitten

56

kittens

1

demon-kitten

1

kitten-strangling

Just keep moving folks, keep moving. And let them never be mentioned again.
Speaking of which:

60

kitten

56

kittens

1

demon-kitten

1

kitten-strangling

Hopefully fewer kittens are in our future. Or we will have to strangle them
all.

We end with some fairly random studies. First, a gender study yielded the
following information about the different types of "boys" mentioned on the
blog:

203

boy

26

cowboy

7

fanboy

6

boyfriend

4

ballboy

3

playboy

1

boy-band

1

ex-boyfriend

1

fratboy

1

georgiaboy

1

mgowhippingboy

1

nancyboy

1

non-fanboy

1

posterboy

1

sissy-boy

1

wonderboy

and about girls:

126

girl

41

girlfriend

2

14-year-old-girl

2

cowgirl

2

farmgirl

1

batgirl

1

ex-girlfriend

1

girl-men

1

girl-on-girl

1

girlish

1

girly

1

then-girlfriend

1

mgogirlfriend

The boys still outnumber the girls, alas. You'll have to look up the
"girl-on-girl" quote on your own, playboy.

And we conclude with some word counts that we noticed "coincidentally"
ended up at the same frequency. Or did they?????

64

lansing

64

oops

123

hopson

123

mistakes

128

harbaugh

128

mom

128

penetration

These results probably mean nothing. But if true about Harbaugh, it may be a
more difficult road for him to climb if he wants to coach here someday. Just
sayin'.

Notes: Michigan beat Ball State 12-8 at the Coastal Tournament. That made the
all time series 17-1.

Much has happened since these two teams squared off just 2 months ago (formatting on that has changed by itself, taking out all of my paragraphs breaks). Michigan has seen their Preseason-All American return to the lineup. Ball State has turned their season back around after starting 3-9. Both teams are in the thick of tight conference pennant races.

This time around, the stakes are equally unimportant in the long run, but both teams need to keep their momentum going as they enter their last full week of regular season games.

That just happened. Michigan wins the series 2-1 on the most stunning senior day in recent memory. This series has it all - A pitcher's duel, a stunning heart breaker, a come-from-behind win on senior day featuring the two co-captains completing a walk off. If you have ever been a baseball fan, this was the series for you.

Game One

Box Score

R

H

E

Northwestern

0

1

0

1

0

1

0

0

0

3

9

3

Michigan

2

0

0

0

0

1

1

0

x

4

10

0

W – Gerbe (2-0)… Save – Burgoon (9)

Game one was the pitchers' duel. Michigan managed the early lead thanks to a leadoff walk of Patrick Biondi. After going to third on a perfectly placed hit and run by Toth, going right through the hole vacated by the second baseman, LaMarre would knock him in on a would-be double play, but Northwestern's second baseman double clutched, giving LaMarre just enough time to beat out the throw. After Berset's single, Crank would line out deep to left, gaining an easy sacrifice fly, and Michigan led 2-0.

Alan Oaks was on the mound for Michigan and had a pretty good game. In his 6 innings of work, he gave up 7 hits and 3 runs. Two of those came in the form of solo home runs by Northwestern's third baseman Chris Lashmet. The third run also involved Lashmet. In the 6th, he would single and score on a Zach Morton double that screamed past a diving Lorenz and took a strange hop off the wall, evading Ryan LaMarre in left.

LaMarre would lead the response for Michigan, knocking a triple off the center field wall. This set up Chris Berset up for an easy RBI single.

Oaks would open the 7th with a hard hit double, and the bullpen would take over for Oaks after that, with the game tied at 3 a piece. Gerbe would give up a sac bunt to move the runner to third, but Mike Dufek made a great play on a slow roller by the next batter to gun the runner trying to score and preserve the tie.

In the bottom of the 7th, Biondi got the offense started on a two-out rally. His walk was followed by back-to-back singles by Toth and LaMarre to bring in a run. With the lead, 4-3, it was all Burgoon from here on out.

Notable Stars

The Pen – 3 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 1 K, W, Save

Anthony Toth – 3/4

Ryan LaMarre – 2/4, 2 R, 2 RBI, 3B

Game Time: 2 hours 35 minutes

Attendance: 1385

Notable Goats

Coley Crank – 0/3 RBI, 3 LOB, SACF

The rest of the series, including the THRILLING CONCLUSION, after the jump.

Just a little bit of change since last week, but ESPN did tweak their ratings a bit. Action since last rankings:

NONE. I think for the first time since I've been doing this, there were no commits in the Big Ten this week. Scout did drop a couple guys down from 3-stars to unranked, which happens to push Wisconsin past Minnesota. Michigan will hopefully have a couple new commits by next Sunday.

Big Ten Recruiting Class Rankings

Rank

School

# of Commits

Rivals 250

Scout Average

ESPN 150

1

Ohio State

10

2

3.40

5

2

Notre Dame

9

4

3.33

4

3

Michigan

4

1

3.25

2

4

Michigan State

5

1

2.40

1

5

Indiana

8

0

1.25

0

7

Wisconsin

2

1

2.00

0

6

Minnesota

2

1

1.00

1

8

Iowa

2

0

1.00

0

9

Northwestern

2

0

1.00

0

10

Illinois

2

0

1.00

0

11

Penn State

0

0

0

0

11

Purdue

0

0

0

0

I'll only make charts for the teams that currently have commits. Rivals 250 means that a given prospect is on the Rivals 250 to Watch, and ESPN 150 means that a prospect is on the Watch List for the ESPNU 150. Scout ratings are on the 5-star scale.

#1 Ohio State - 10 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Steve Miller

DE

250

5

150*

Kenny Hayes

DE

250

4

46

Brian Bobek

OL

NR

4

150*

Chase Farris

DE

NR

4

150*

DerJuan Gambrell

CB

NR

4

45

Jeremy Cash

S

NR

3

150*

Jeff Heuerman

TE

NR

3

150*

Antonio Underwood

OL

NR

3

46

Chris Carter

OL

NR

3

46

Tommy Brown

OL

NR

1

46

ESPN now deems DE Chase Farris worthy of being on the ESPN150 watch list.

#2 Notre Dame - 9 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Ben Koyack

TE

250

5

150*

Conor Hanratty

OL

250

4

150*

Matt Hegarty

OL

250

4

150*

Jarrett Grace

LB

250

4

46

Jordan Prestwood

OL

NR

4

150*

Tony Springmann

OL

NR

4

46

Brad Carrico

OL

NR

3

46

Matthias Farley

CB

NR

1

46

Kyle Brindza

K

NR

1

45

Nothing new for the Irish.

#3 Michigan - 4 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Delonte Hollowell

CB

250

3

150*

Brennen Beyer

DE

NR

4

150*

Greg Brown

CB

NR

3

46

Shawn Conway

WR

NR

3

46

Brennen Beyer goes back on the ESPN150 watchlist.

#4 Michigan State - 5 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Lawrence Thomas

LB

250

5

150*

Onaje Miller

RB/Ath

NR

4

45

Connor Cook

QB

NR

1

46

AJ Sims

CB

NR

1

46

Taiwan Jones

Ath/LB

NR

1

45

No change.

#5 Indiana - 8 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Jake Reed

TE

NR

3

46

Kyle Kennedy

LB

NR

1

46

Tre Roberson

QB

NR

1

46

Kirk Harris

OL

NR

1

46

Ralston Evans

OL

NR

1

46

Zack Shaw

LB

NR

1

46

Mike Replogle

LB

NR

1

45

Max Pirman

LB

NR

1

45

Teams are going to start passing the Hoosiers once they get more commits.

#6 Wisconsin - 2 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Jake Keefer

LB

250

3

46

Sam Arneson

TE

NR

1

46

No change for Wisconsin.

#7 Minnesota - 2 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Tommy Olson

OL

250

1

150*

James Farrow

CB

NR

1

46

ESPN finally acknowledges that Calvin Phillips isn't committed to the Gophers (which he hasn't been for at least a couple months now).

#8 Iowa - 3 Commits

Name

Position

Rivals

Scout

ESPN

Austin Blythe

OL

NR

1

46

Marcus Grant

WR

NR

1

46

JaCorey Shepherd

WR

NR

1

46

Iowa picks up a decent offensive lineman. They're right on the heels of Minnesota and Wisconsin, passing Northwestern and Illinois.

Introduction

Summer is upon is, and with it, a bit of a lull in our mgoblogging fervor - there are simply not as many sports to talk about. The great wait for the football season begins.

With this in mind, what better time to celebrate this very blog in some bizarre and uniquely mgobloggish way? Hence I present: MGoStats, a statistical look at this blog over the years since its inception.

It began on December 4th, 2004, with the following post at 6:30am by some guy named Brian:

GoBlog()
{
HelloWorld
}

An inauspicious beginning, to say the least, but thus mgoblog was born. In the years since, we have all come here for a multitude of reasons: to celebrate the highs, commiserate during the lows, but mostly for one single reason, which is to hear what one Brian Cook has to say about all matters Michigan Football (and occasionally other sports).

So I found myself wondering: how much has Brian said over the years? A couple of python scripts later, I had some answers. I wrote a trivial script to download the entire blog (old pages are available through links of the form http://www.mgoblog.com/?page=X, where higher X values link to older pages), and then a less trivial script to parse the downloaded content into a more manageable form. The python SGML parser is amazing, for those of you who care about such things.

What I found follows below. Note: there may be some errors, but I believe the results to be in the right ballpark.

Overall Results

Perhaps the single most amazing fact is that Brian himself has written something on the order of 3 million words (or typed about 17 million characters) over about 3600 articles. Wow! That's a lot of content, from his hands to our eyeballs.

Who

Articles

Words (Millions)

Characters (Millions)

Brian

3595

2.952

17.48

Total

3976

3.258

19.19

The table shows these sums, as well as the sums across all contributed articles (including ones from Tim, TomVH, formerlyanonymous, and anyone else who has made the front page). It might be interesting to see how these counts (number of articles, number of words, number of comments made by users) play out on a week-by-week basis. So interesting one could even make a ... chart? Chart. Or actually, Charts.

Charts

The first chart I present is the number of articles published per week over the entire existence of mgoblog.

From the chart, one can observe some interesting facts. First, from mgoblog we should expect about 14 articles per week on average over the course of a year. Second, that number is notably higher in the fall (no surprise), and lower in the spring. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, one can see the growth of the mgoblog community in the orange bars, which represent articles written by somebody other than Brian; this content, which now represents a significant portion of mgoblog, picked up halfway through last year and has continued to get stronger. Brian's efforts at making the blog more than just himself are clearly having an impact.

The second chart just shows the number of words on a per week basis:

The graph reflects the same trends seen above, but in word counts. Even early on, Brian was producing above 10,000 words per week during football season, and last year during the same season, we were spoiled with over 30,000 words per week about the sport and team we love.

Finally, I show the number of comments per article:

The big effect in this graph is the lack of comments before the switch to the new blog infrastructure (e.g., the Haloscan era). The other effect is the growth of the community: the difference in the number of comments in Fall '08 and Fall '09 is likely a sign of the increased importance of this site as a place for the broad UM football community. Aside: the one early outlier which has a large number of comments (Fall '06) is just full of a bunch of comment spam: Unverified Voracity 99 Bonus Guest. Who knows why it's there, but Brian should probably remove those comments.

Longest Articles

I was also interested in what the longest articles were, but that should have been obvious: UFRs. Here are the ten longest articles (by number of letters in the article):

Nothing gets people rev'd up like the Offense's Units, or RAWK MUSIC, I guess.

Word Usage

Finally, I was generally curious as to what words show up in the blog. Sounds like a case for a ... chart? Nope. But close, a wordle:

The word cloud here shows a list of the most popular words used in this blog, with some editing done by y.t. to remove words like "the" (actually the most popular word on the site) and so forth.

Anyhow, that's all for now. An amazing amount of content, built up over the years on the backs of UFRs and other regular features we all know and love. Thanks Brian for all the hard work - it is truly staggering to see the sheer verbiage that has powered the site over the years.

This is an offer that I was expecting to happen sooner, rather than later. QB Brett Hundley out of Chandler High School, in Arizona, received an offer from Michigan today. "They called my coach, Coach Ewan, and then he told me they had offered," said Hundley.

This one is exciting for me, because it's another Michigan recruit in my home state. I saw Brett play this past season, and he's the real deal. He's a 6-foot-4, 210-pound athletic dual threat quarterback. He says his strengths are, "Leadership, mobility, I'm coachable, and I have a pretty strong arm. I do think I need to work on my footwork, though." I would add that academics are a strong point for Brett, since he carries a 3.9 GPA.

Hundley holds offers now from Arizona, ASU, LSU, Oregon, Nebraska, Stanford, UCLA, Washington, and Michigan just to name a few. He hasn't started to focus on recruiting yet, and told me, "No one's in the lead right now. Everything is wide open for me. I'm going to start taking trips in June, or July. After that I'll start all my officials, when I'm allowed to." When asked if Michigan will receive one of those visits, he said, "I'm definitely going to talk to my dad about that one."

Chandler High is in spring practice right now, and I will be heading out to watch this coming week. I'll have some practice footage, and possibly a video interview sometime later this week.